


Crossfire

by theappleppielifestyle



Category: The Avengers
Genre: Budapest, F/M, I wrote a het fic what how did this happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-05
Updated: 2012-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-09 05:26:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not love- god, neither of them are stupid enough to say that- but this is SHIELD. This is their lives, and they’re both kind of twisted, kind of frayed at the edges. </p>
<p>It’s because they’re both two incredibly separate people.</p>
<p>It’s because they’re alone, because they were raised like that, trained like that, and they’re used to it, because they have to be.</p>
<p>They’re alone. Except when they’re not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crossfire

_Love is for children_ , her father used to say.

She doesn’t remember, not quite- it’s sort of a phantom memory, fingers ghosting around the back of her eyes, over her wrist where her father used to press his thumb whenever he told her this, the thick curl of Russian over her ears, her tongue.

And oh, how she had believed him. How she would have set the sun for him: her father, blazing brighter than her mother, than her brother, with their pale eyes and mouths and hair, ever could.

But her father was a fire, personified: fierce, dazzling, always coming home with a split lip or a story already pouring, setting on the windowsill.

It’s one of the only things she remembers clearly from back then, the only rule, the quiet thud at the back of her throat: _Любовь к детям_ : _love is for children_.

She was never a child.

She had been younger, yes- she has a photograph of a toddler that has her eyes, a photo that curls at the edges, that is charred on one side, blotting out her parent’s faces, her brother’s.

But never a _child_. She never had the chance.

Not that she remembers.

Sometimes, she gets flashes, like old triggers that have been unused for years going off in her brain, like the _click_ of a rifle, a handgun that she once held in burned hands: the heavy, sweet perfume of oranges in the yard, the weight of them in her palm.

Of the rare press of lips to her forehead, to a woman with petal-eyes and calloused hands saying, “ _Спи, мой маленький детеныш_.”

Of soft, mellow sun on her feet, of dirt baking her toes, of long nights over the fire, roasting potatoes in foil.

Then, the peaches- the juice running down her chin, the hand cupped to catch it. The ooze of it through her fingers, through her brother’s beard, through him scooping her up and whirling her around in his arms, lightheaded and stupid and dizzy.

The sharp, twisting winters that fell like a woollen blanket, how her mother with her twig-curls and fading-skin had lain in bed, her limbs like bird-bones.

The hot, sticky stench of blood on the pillowcase, and then the fire, always the fire.

It’s the fire that defines her: the fumbling, black ash around her hands, whipping her hair into tangles, coals at her heels.

Whenever she dreams nowadays, it always comes back to the fire.

After that, there were no oranges, or blackberries, or peaches.

She can’t remember her brother’s face anymore.

Actually, when it comes down to it, she can’t remember her real name.

-

Clint grows up everywhere.

He grows, and everything blurs together: town names, names of customers and what they’re naming the next carnival and what his act is, from bottom-feeder to fire-eater to _something_ , he can’t even remember.

The roads don’t stay the same, either: the carts run up over cobblestones and hot asphalt, over loose rocks that they have to push up the hill.

Clint gets used to running, to curling up in a small, tight space and letting everything wash over him: the slow, steady rock of the road, the elephants a few carts away, the faded, flecked paint of the wood in front of him, the swish of the tiger’s tail.

He grows up getting away from crowds, finding the perfect hiding spot, knowing when to smile, how to sell it, how to judge what to do next from the crowd’s reaction.

He finds his homes in not having any, of _one-night-and-one-night-only_ -s, of lights on strings, lanterns dangling from hooks, of learning how to live with wild animals in the crate next to him.

When someone new offers to give him shooting lessons, he says, “I already know how to shoot a gun.”

The man’s eyebrows raise, clamp to the top of his forehead. “How the heck does a whipp’r like you get a gun?”

Clint shrugs. “In this gig, you grow up fast. So, thanks, but no thanks, man-”

“Wasn’t talking ‘bout a gun, kid,” the man says. He grins, and his eyes bunch up at the sides.

Clint watches as the man slides a bow out from his duffel and tells him, “This is a billion times better than any damn gun you’ll ever see.”

 It’s like music, like the world shutting down around him, like his blood singing and the absolute and utter _control_ as he slings the twine back, barely aware of holding his breath.

He lets go, feeling the knife-slice of air next to his cheek, and it feels like something snapping into place.

The arrow slides with a _thunk_ right in the centre of the tacked-on bullseye.

-

Once upon a time, Natasha had gotten songs stuck in her head.

Old ones, passed down from mother to daughter, father to son, sister to sister to brother to brother, and they used to linger in her head like smoke, chasing each other around.

Then the _actual_ smoke came, and it cleared everything else away.

The houses, the thatched villages, the woman with knobbly fingers and thick, gold rings that used to wave to her when she crossed the street-

Rubble, fire, ash, streaking into each other, and she never remembers the songs again.

The tune of them, maybe- she sometimes gets glimpses when she walks past a busker, soft, lulling notes that drift and stay there.

At those times, she closes her eyes and remembers:

Large, silver coins that jingle in her pocket. Burning her tongue on the pan when her mother gets up on Sundays. Her brother, the smear of his face, the breadcrumb-specks of blood in the sink when he had cut himself shaving for the first time.

But never the lyrics, never the soft Russian, the cold, hard Russian, the Russian like a match set alight in the cave of her mouth.

After the fire, there are only barked orders, blisters on her fingers, scrubbing her hands until they bleed.

Marching, always marching- she hears an officer say _child soldiers_ , say _brainwash_ and _crimes against humanity,_ and she ignores it.

Elbow to elbow, one hand in a vicious salute, chanting until she’s on autopilot:

_Долой мятежников. Для нас вы залога:_ _Down with the rebels. To us you pledge_.

For a long time, it’s the only clear thing she can think.

She is expandable, she is one of many, she is a buffalo in a heard, and she fights tooth and nail for it, against it.

Years pass, calendar to calendar, bullet to bullet, and thoughts are put into her head, words to her mouth.

The first person she kills is a middle-aged blading man with too many fillings, and he begs in English: “Please, don’t, I have children, I’ll give you anything-”

She takes his words and strangles him with them, with a tight cord of coiled pleadings, until froth starts up his throat.

She completes her missions, comes back to base and checks into her room for the next target.

She accepts her aliases, learns how to fake a smile, fake a laugh, fake interest and anger and orgasms. She learns how to fake a personality, fake a _person_ , and in the off-moments that she is punished for afterwards, she sometimes finds herself wondering who she is without the masks.

A woman tells her, one night after she’s been talking in her sleep: _You are not a person_.

Tells her, _you are here for the mission and nothing more_.

Tells her, _you are an agent. You are expendable_.

 Later- years later, maybe, when she has to take bunches of her hair in her hands and hack at it with a butterfly knife because it’s getting in her eyes- she’s in Greece, and her officer asks her, “What’s your name?

She says, “Recruit Alpha-0812.”

“No,” the man says. “What’s your _name?”_

-

Clint loses his virginity without his shirt coming off, behind the lion’s den while the rest of the circus is packing up.

It hurts- like he’s being split open, and he bites down hard on his lip and tries to focus on the dirt mashing into his elbows, the lift and fall of the familiar carnival music.

The guy- Mastiff, Clint thinks his name is, or at least that’s what he told him, anyway- fucks him slowly, and jerks Clint off through it with rough, experienced hands.

Clint manages to come, a feeble orgasm through the now-fading pain, and forces himself not to whimper as Mastiff pulls out.

They don’t speak as they pull their pants up, button their flies, and Clint starts towards the tent that he had been in the middle of folding up when Mastiff’s hand closes around his wrist.

He finds himself being turned around, finds Mastiff pushing his mouth against his- for the first time, he’d like to point out- and blinks in surprise.

“Uh,” Mastiff says as he pulls back, and Clint thinks he’s blushing. He has to be a few years older than him- 24, 25, maybe.

Clint rubs his hand across his own jaw, thinking of the stubble burn that he’s going to have. “Yep. Nice knowing you.”

He starts towards the tent again, and Mastiff’s voice is unsteady as he says, “Hey, do you want a job?”

Clint turns, the shift making him wince- mother _fucker_ , he understands why everyone makes jokes about limping now.

“I mean,” Mastiff says, scrubbing at the back of his head. “I saw your act before, it was- we could use a guy like you.”

Clint looks him up and down- black slacks, slight scruff of stubble, wrinkled tie.

“What do you do?”

Mastiff half-smiles. “It’s, uh. It’s kind of complicated.”

Clint nods. “Okey-dokey. What would I do?”

“Again,” Mastiff says. “Kind of complicated.”

-

He’s assigned to a handler, and that’s not what it sounds like.

Coulson, First-Name-Agent-And-Stop-Asking-Me-For-God-Sake’s-Barton, who wears crisp suits and writes up mission statements and can kill someone with a zipper and a plastic bag.

Clint quips at the right moments, steals their cable TV, spends restless nights on the roof of SHIELD’s HQ when he can’t sleep, and generally is a professional pain in Coulson (and Fury)’s ass with some missions on the side.

He does the missions, shoots the bad guys, hacks into some high-security files on the occasion that he thinks SHIELD might be fucking someone over, mostly him.

He’s not an agent, per se, but he’s not quite anything else, either. They don’t have… control over him, let’s say.

But SHIELD is SHIELD, as it has always been, and everyone, after a while, is moulded into whatever SHEILD wants it to be.

A few times, he finds his sorry ass being dragged out of a hot zone by none other than Phil (and yes, he may have hacked into some more files to find that out) Coulson, who calls up a helicopter and starts patching up whatever wound Clint has managed to get this time.

“My hero,” Clint slurs, his head flopping on Coulson’s shoulder.

“Damn right,” Coulson says, glancing over his shoulder, gun in hand. “Don’t tell me I never did anything for you.”

Clint turns so his face is pressed into the folds of Coulson’s shirt. “How dare you accuse me of such an atrshh… atrosh… atrocious… thing.”

He feels the huffed laughter vibrate through Coulson’s chest. “Don’t hurt yourself, Barton.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”

-

Three days after his twenty-ninth birthday (Coulson had suddenly needed to ‘talk over some case files,’ and they had spent the night watching reruns of Supernanny and drinking bad beer), Clint gets another file.

“Your text target,” Fury tells him. “Alias Natasha Romanoff.”

Clint skims the picture. “Cool. What’d she do?”

Fury fixes his eye on him. “Nothing you need to know about, Barton.”

-

Natasha is in Budapest when she notices she’s being followed.

She’s no stranger to being tracked, and she pulls all the basic manoeuvres, easy as breathing.

After a day has passed and she still hasn’t shaken him off, she’s actually kind of impressed. Pissed, but impressed. She has to give the guy props- she’s a tough woman to follow.

SHIELD has been after her for a while, but this is the first guy that has actually caught up to her.

_Kudos to you_ , she thinks to herself, dragging her eyes from the woman that she’s supposed to have killed three hours ago.

The man has been hiding on top of roofs almost the entire time- always a considerable distance away, always just a speck peeking out from behind a chimney or a clothesline.

Natasha turns on her heel, and starts walking.

-

The bastard is leading him away.

How the hell did she even _find_ an abandoned warehouse in a crowded town like this?

Clint’s jaw works stiffly, slinging his bow around his shoulder and tucking his arrow back into his electronic quiver.

Okay, so she knows he’s following her. Fuck.

There aren’t even any windows, how the hell is he supposed to-

Natasha opens the door to the warehouse, and gives a two-fingered salute in his direction. She calls, in a thinly-veiled Russian accent: “Are you coming in, or not?”

His mouth may or may not twitch upwards.

“Give me a second to get down.”

She shrugs, leaning against the door. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Clint re-adjusts his bow before jumping to the roof of the warehouse, landing a few inches away from the railing. He judges the distance, thinking about jumping the last dozen meters before grabbing the pipe and scaling down, hand-over-hand.

When he lands on the dirt, feet-first, Natasha looks impressed. “Nice. SHIELD, correct?”

Clint lets his hands knock together. “Pays the bills. Y’know, like the whole ‘you killing people’ thing.”

Natasha’s laugh, when it comes, is surprisingly gentle. “I don’t do it to pay the bills. Well, I do, but that’s only half of it.”

Something twists in Clint’s gut at that. “Yeah? What’s the other half?”

Natasha’s smile is too even- Clint can imagine her practicing it in a mirror, the different techniques, how to entice different people, how to read into what kind of person to distract next, what to say, how to move.

Well, it’s working- Clint is fucking _distracted_.

She breathes out through those perfect, pink lips, and her smile stays in place. “Why do you do what you do? Whatever it is that you do.”

Clint’s fingers flex slightly around his bow. “Better than my previous day-job.”

“Assassin?”

“Carnie.”

“Nice,” she says again, her lips curving upwards even more.

Clint knows how this goes- he’s met a lot of them. The manipulators, the faux-innocent ones, the ones who hide behind their aliases and let everyone think there’s nothing else there until the knives come out.

“So,” Natasha says. “Does the mysterious agent have a name?”

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

Natasha’s tongue poises over her teeth for a moment. “Fair bargain. My name is Lee. Lee Kerall.”

“Sounds…” Clint makes a face. “Decidedly not Russian. Could you possibly be lying to me, Tasha?”

“That’s not my name,” Natasha says.

Clint raises an eyebrow. “Neither is ‘Lee’. I’m Clint Barton, by the way. Thought I’d be polite.”

Natasha nods. “Well, you either used a fake name, or are just incredibly stupid. Are you here to capture me or kill me, agent Barton?”

“Kill you, obviously.” Clint shrugs. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have told you my real name. Sort of have to kill you now. Oops.”

“Oops,” Natasha agrees, still not dropping the smile. “I’m sure you’re very torn up about it. How’s about we go inside?”

Clint half-bows as he opens the door. “Ladies first.”

Natasha says, “Well, go on then.”

Clint fights back a grin. “Y’know, I really think I’d like this better if you were an asshole.”

“I don’t really have a problem with it,” Natasha says, closing the door behind her. “Shall we?”

Clint slides his bow down his arm, letting the familiar weight rest in his palm. “Let’s.”

-

When Natasha wakes up, everything blurs at the edges.

She squeezes her eyes shut, hard, and when she opens them again, the dashboard in front of her stays in focus.

“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey.”

Natasha starts, one hand automatically coming up, but she forces it down as she looks to the driver’s seat.

Her throat clicks, and she distantly thinks: _concussion_. “Where are we going?”

Clint taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “SHIELD. Breathe, I’m not turning you in.”

Natasha’s eyes flicker over him. It comes in bits and pieces: the fight, how she had miscalculated, missed a step, how Clint had brought back his bow hand and had aimed it at her neck.

How she had said, _do it_.

How Clint’s finger had faltered on the arrow, and Natasha had barked, _Сделай это! Do it!_

Clint’s finger hadn’t moved, and Natasha had half-bared her teeth, animalistic. _Сделай это! Чего вы боитесь? Just fucking-_

How Clint’s bow had reared back, lightning-quick, then had come down, and the blow to the head that had sent Natasha to the floor.

Natasha brings one hand to the back of her skull, where her hair is matted with blood. She scrapes it through her nails and it comes off in dried flecks; falling like dust onto the car seat.

It’s a long time before she speaks. “Why didn’t you take the shot?”

For a second, Clint doesn’t say anything. Then he clears his throat, leans over. “What station do you want it on?”

“What?”

“The radio.”

Natasha feels groggy- she hasn’t lost much blood, but fucking head wounds, _fuck_. “I- where are we?”

“Illinois,” Clint says. Then, to her blink- and it was just a _blink_ , she didn’t look surprised or anything- “Yeah, I know. Apparently I hit you too hard. You’ve been out for a while. That, and you were kind of half-dead already. When’s the last time you ate?”

Natasha tries to remember- definitely before getting her last target.

And oh, fuck, her last target- she hadn’t killed her, which would mean bad news.

“Uh,” she says, and mentally scolds herself. She hasn’t stuttered since she was fifteen, or said _um_ or _uh_ or any variation of that by accident since she was twelve. “Were we in a helicopter before?”

Clint _hmmm_ -s. “I thought you were awake for some of that. Yeah, they flew us over. One of the benefits to being one of SHIELD’s lackeys.”

Natasha’s eyes slip shut, the quiet lull of the road strangely comforting.

She distantly hears Barton- Clint- say, “Tasha?”

When she falls back into unconsciousness, mostly due to the concussion mixed with the morphine they must have given her on the helicopter, she can’t shake the feeling of something she hasn’t felt in a long time, something that reminds her of dirt between her toes, of her fingers closing around a peach, of before she had had to spit out her own blood to give out her mission statement.

It feels more… human, sort of. Like she’s tracking back into what she used to be, before she became a weapon to be used against the enemy, slipping into different names and personalities when she’s ordered to.

It feels human. Different. Familiar.

Home.

-

“Barton,” Coulson says.

Clint blinks innocently. “Sir.”

Coulson stares tiredly at him for a few seconds before sighing. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Barton, but is that or is that not the woman that you were sent to kill?”

Clint meets his gaze evenly. “They share a distinct likeness, sir.”

Coulson opens his mouth to say something, but then gives up. He puts his fingers to the bridge of his nose, pinching slightly, and Clint waits patiently.

“And your reason for this, Barton?”

“We’re madly, deeply in love, and we don’t care that she was born a man, it shouldn’t be frowned upo-” Clint manages not to yelp as Natasha discreetly steps on his foot.

He breathes in through his nose. “I made the call, sir.”

“A risky one, Barton.” Coulson folds his arms, looking at Natasha with something bordering on indifference.

Clint shrugs, his bow shifting with the movement. “Let’s hope it pays off and she doesn’t brutally murder us in our sleep.”

Coulson looks like he’s struggling not to smile. “Right. Well, then, Barton. I’ll leave her in your capable hands. Until next time, Miss Romanoff.”

“Call him ‘sir,’” Clint stage-whispers at Natasha. “He loves it.”

“Also,” Coulson says from the doorway, “Never listen to anything Agent Barton says, ever.”

Natasha keeps a straight face as she says, “I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”

Coulson’s footsteps skid to a stop. He sighs deeply, from his chest, and turns back to face them. “Do not make me regret this, Barton.”

“Of course not, sir.”

Coulson’s gaze darts over them both, and settles on Clint. “I’ll talk to Fury in the morning.”

Clint nods firmly. “Right. Absolutely did not see that one coming, sir.”

Coulson clicks his jaw from side to side, turning back and heading out the door. “You’re going to be the death of me, Barton.”

“I know you mean it with love,” Clint calls as Coulson closes the door behind him.

-

They’re not happy with it, but Clint is SHIELD’s best marksman and they don’t want to lose him, so Natasha Romanoff becomes Agent Natasha Romanoff, and everything starts to shift.

Natasha stares people down in coffee rooms, charms everyone with the pale-pink smile and tinkling laughter, and Clint sees right through it every time.

They don’t live together, not even close- they both go off on their own separate missions, MIA for weeks before knocking on each other’s door with a split lip and a six-pack of beer.

Months pass, then a year, then two, and Natasha has never actually kept track of time like this before.

“You shouldn’t trust me,” she says one night to the bottom of a glass.

Clint just shrugs. “Back at you.”

She’s incredibly drunk and there’s nothing on TV, so she says, “I’m not a good person.”

Again, the warm lift of his shoulders that Natasha is getting too familiar with. “Who the hell do you think I am?”

It’s like that. They find themselves at each other’s apartment, in a safehouse in the middle of a shootout, knowing what the other one is going to say or need or shoot before they do, and neither of them can imagine being anywhere else.

But Natasha has never grown around things, she grows _through_ them- through bitter Russian through loudspeakers, wading through blood up to her knees, through skinned palms and flames, the smoke wrapping around her as she fumbles for her father.

And yet she finds herself growing around too many things: she finds a favourite gun, one that fits perfectly into her hand, into the strap she keeps on her thigh, and she’s never been sentimental but it just seems to fit.

Coulson, who always seems to be around: paperwork or getting them to actually fill things out or covering them during a mission, he’s always there with an impeccable suit and a comm and a glare that could kill a wild bear.

He’s _there_ , always is, with blunt timing and a nod and a _good to see you, agents_.

_Likewise, sir_ , they reply, and Natasha has never been a girl of routine, but.

But.

But then there’s the carpet back at HQ that she’s getting used to. Then there are reruns of shows that she never watched the first time around. Then there’s movies, domesticity, sitting on the roof with Clint at obscene hours because neither of them want to sleep, and-

And Clint.

Clint, who never pushes, never asks about her past until she wants to talk about it, who sits close but never tries anything, who stitches her up with the same hands she has seen kill a man less than an hour ago, the same hands that cradle a bow like he does, the hands that skim up the arrow like she wants them to skim up her hips.

Clint, who rests his head in her neck and tells her that she hums Russian in her sleep, who knows every line to every episode of ‘Friends,’ who flat-up refuses to go to circuses, who likes his coffee black.

Clint, who she’s comfortable with, and _fuck_ , she’s never been able to say that and she’s pretty sure Clint hasn’t in a long time, either.

It’s not _love_ \- god, neither of them are stupid enough to say that- but this is SHIELD. This is their lives, and they’re both kind of twisted, kind of frayed at the edges.

They’re Hawkeye and Black Widow, they don’t have a sidekick, they don’t accept being a sidekick. They are not a joint unit, except when they are.

It’s not love. It runs deeper than that, cuts right to the quick, right to walking into their bedroom on those nights and just lying there, not saying anything and not needing to.

It’s fighting like clockwork, not asking for a gun but getting one anyway, tying a belt up above the bullet wound as the other sits up and empties a clip into whoever (or whatever) the fuck they’re fighting.

It’s not about the sex, not about how Natasha finds herself biting down on Clint’s name whenever she fucks someone else for a mission, or how she loves seeing an old bite-mark of hers on Clint’s shoulder, or how Clint’s breathing goes ragged whenever she pins him down on whatever sheets the motel that they’re staying at has.

It’s because they know each other better than anyone else, because they aren’t supposed to, because they’re too close and can go for months without seeing each other and come back and it’ll still be the same.

It’s because they’re both two incredibly separate people.

It’s because they’re alone, because they were raised like that, trained like that, and they’re used to it, because they have to be.

They’re alone. Except when they’re not.

-

“I’m a SHIELD shadow,” Natasha says, her eyes flicking over him- he’s hungover, obviously, with dark bruises smudged under his sunglasses.

Stark says something, slurs it a bit, and Natasha watches the black in his neck creep up his veins.

-

Natasha asks, again: “Why didn’t you take the shot?”

Clint just kisses her- apparently they’re kissing again- and she lets herself get lost, her fingers in his hair.

-

Loki may be a god, but he’s still a man, and Natasha uses this to her advantage.

“Your world in the balance,” he says through the glass, still with that snake-smile, “and you bargain for one man?”

“Regimes fall everyday. I tend not to weep over that, I’m Russian.” She rolls her tongue in her mouth, over her molars, over her perfect American accent. “Or at least I was.”

She tells him the truth: _I’ve got red in my ledger. I’d like to wipe it out_.

Loki, god of mischief, brother of Thor, burdened with glorious purpose, is still just a man. When he slams his fist against the glass, she lets herself jump. Makes a sob tear its way up his throat, makes Loki’s grin widen as she says, _you’re a monster_.

She cherishes the look on his face, the uncertainty, as she turns, every hair in place, her expression neutral.

She’s about to leave when she turns back. This- this is for her. This is for every man who has ever underestimated her, who hasn’t looked closer and had gotten their throat slit for it.

“Thank you,” she says, her lips maybe curling up a bit too much. “For your co-operation.”

_I am a lot of things_ , she doesn’t say. _But I am not a balm_.

-

His eyes are brown again- that familiar coffee-brown that she’s grown to live in, instead of that naked, electric blue from the staff.

He’s going to break down later, she knows. Some time or another, everyone has to, and Clint’s staring at the ceiling, which is always a telling sign.

He says, “Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?”

Natasha remembers oranges, peaches, the heavy drip of them down her wrist. Fire tracing the scar along her spine, marking her neck, kissing softly along her arm, her shoulder, and then gripping hard enough to bruise, to burn.

She remembers the whip, the electric chair, how her knuckles had bled for days afterwards. The first kick of the gun in her hand, how she had stumbled backwards. The sharp kick to the stomach, the first cough of blood.

Natasha waits until he looks at her.

“You know I do.”

-

They stop Loki, save the world, and Coulson dies.

Thor says it was quick, but they both catch the flicker of his eyes as he says it.

They nod, and Natasha says, “Thank you, Thor. He’d be glad he went out fighting.”

“He was a true warrior,” Thor says. “Even to his end. I will honour him.”

“Mm,” Clint says. “Ditto. Where are you guys going, anyway?”

Thor looks back at Loki, who glowers at him, and if it weren’t for the silver blocking his mouth, Natasha would think he’d be sticking his tongue out at them.

“Home,” Thor says, something heavy behind his eyes. “Mother will be most glad to see my brother again. I shall be back, though.”

From behind them, Steve says, “We’re looking forward to it, buddy.”

Neither Clint or Natasha say anything when their hands bump together, and stay there.

-

They’re all a jumbled wreck, a team that shouldn’t be a team because of all the cross-variables, all the things that should clash and prevent them from actually working together.

‘Unstable’ would be putting it lightly. Every single one of the Avengers has at least mild PTSD, and that’s not even going into how Tony’s been waking up screaming lately, or how Steve flinches occasionally when someone opens the fucking freezer.

They’re all too different, too fucked-up, too unhinged to work together, except they do.

It works.

It works, and they all find themselves accidentally forming a unit, a team, a family, even- they show Steve how to shop without having a nervous breakdown because _who needs an entire isle for crackers, why would anyone think this is a good idea, how are bananas so cheap now, what the heck is an avocado_ -

Thor, after he comes back, breaks three Jacuzzis in the span of a month, and Tony ends up paying for all of them.

Bruce and Tony stay up for days on end, and at the point where they’re literally sagging against the walls and are babbling about their latest scientific breakthough, JARVIS mysteriously malfunctions and lets someone into the lab- mostly Steve, but it’s been all of them on some occasions.

Clint gets Darcy to practise archery, and she royally sucks at it, but they end up slumped against the desk, laughing their asses off because of a prank they had pulled on Fury.

It ends up with them both getting suspended from SHIELD HQ, but whatever. Darcy has a recording of it on her phone.

It works, and it’s great, and they keep catching themselves laughing at stupid times, like at 4 a.m. and all sane/non insomniac people are asleep, but the Avengers are all up eating ice cream and watching a ‘Friends’ marathon that Clint quotes the entire way through.

_Love is for children_ , Natasha thinks.

She shoves it aside.

**Author's Note:**

> Basically 50000 words of my clint/natasha feelings. I don't know how this happened.  
> Also, I used Google Translate to get the Russian, so it could be wrong.


End file.
